The Deciders

The disastrous Iraq policies that led to ISIS were not President Bush’s.

In May 2003, in the wake of the Iraq War and the ousting of Saddam Hussein, events took place that set the stage for the current chaos in the Middle East. Yet even most well-informed Americans are unaware of how policies implemented by mid-level bureaucrats during the Bush administration unwittingly unleashed forces that would ultimately lead to the juggernaut of the Islamic State.

The lesson is that it appears all too easy for outsiders working with relatively low-level appointees to hijack the policy process. The Bay of Pigs invasion and Iran-Contra affair are familiar instances, but the Iraq experience offers an even better illustration—not least because its consequences have been even more disastrous.

The cast of characters includes President George W. Bush; L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the first civilian administrator of postwar Iraq; Douglas Feith, Bush’s undersecretary of defense for policy; Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s deputy secretary of defense; I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Richard B. Cheney (and Cheney’s proxy in these events); Walter Slocombe, who had been President Clinton’s undersecretary of defense for policy, and as such was Feith’s predecessor; Richard Perle, who was chairman of Bush’s defense policy board; and General Jay Garner, whom Bremer replaced as the leader of postwar Iraq.

On May 9, 2003, President Bush appointed Bremer to the top civilian post in Iraq. A career diplomat who was recruited for this job by Wolfowitz and Libby, despite the fact that he had minimal experience of the region and didn’t speak Arabic, Bremer arrived in Baghdad on May 12 to take charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA. In his first two weeks at his post, Bremer issued two orders that would turn out to be momentous. Enacted on May 16, CPA Order Number 1 “de-Baathified” the Iraqi government; on May 23, CPA Order Number 2 disbanded the Iraqi army. In short, Baath party members were barred from participation in Iraq’s new government and Saddam Hussein’s soldiers lost their jobs, taking their weapons with them.

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The results of these policies become clear as we learn about the leadership of ISIS. The Washington Post, for example, reported in April that “almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers.” In June, the New York Times identified a man “believed to be the head of the Islamic State’s military council,” Fadel al-Hayali, as “a former lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi military intelligence agency of President Saddam Hussein.” Criticism of de-Baathification and the disbanding of Iraq’s army has been fierce, and the contribution these policies made to fueling extremism was recognized even before the advent of the Islamic State. The New York Times reported in 2007:

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents.

This year the Washington Post summed up reactions to both orders when it cited a former Iraqi general who asked bluntly, “When they dismantled the army, what did they expect those men to do?” He explained that “they didn’t de-Baathify people’s minds, they just took away their jobs.” Writing about the disbanding policy in his memoir, Decision Points, George W. Bush acknowledges the harmful results: “Thousands of armed men had just been told they were not wanted. Instead of signing up for the new military, many joined the insurgency.”

Yet in spite of the wide-ranging consequences of these de-Baathification and disbanding policies, they—and the decision-making processes that led to them—remain obscure to most Americans. What is more, it is unclear whether Bush himself knew about these policies before they were enacted. In November 2003, the Washington Post claimed, “Before the war, President Bush approved a plan that would have put several hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers on the U.S. payroll and kept them available to provide security.” There had apparently been two National Security Council meetings, one on March 10 and another on March 12, during which the president approved a moderate de-Baathification policy and a plan, as reported by the New York Times’ Michael R. Gordon, to “use the Iraqi military to help protect the country.” (The invasion of Iraq began on March 19.) President Bush later told biographer Robert Draper that “the policy was to keep the army intact” but it “didn’t happen.”

So the question remains: if CPA Orders 1 and 2 weren’t Bush’s policies, whose were they? In 2007, Doug Feith told the Los Angeles Times that “until everybody writes memoirs and all the researchers look at the documents, some of these things are hard to sort out. You could be in the thick of it and not necessarily know all the details.” Now that the memoirs have been written, it is time to establish just who the policymakers were in May 2003.

The various accounts present an array of neoconservative thinkers—notably Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Walter Slocombe—who implemented their own policies rather than those of the president they served. Moreover, one of the major influences on these policies was the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who had thought he would be put in charge of postwar Iraq, having “been led to believe that by Perle and Feith,” as General Garner related to the journalist Thomas Ricks. And while the responsibility for what happened ultimately lies with George W. Bush—who, to his credit, avers as much in his own memoir—this episode demonstrates how knowledgeable mid-level advisors can hijack the American presidency to suit their own goals.

♦♦♦

At the start of May 2003, the chief administrative entity in Iraq was the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (OHRA), which was replaced shortly thereafter by the CPA under Bremer. The head of OHRA was General Garner, who worked “under the eyes of senior Defense Department aides with direct channels to Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Under Secretary for Policy Douglas J. Feith,” according to the Washington Post. For his part, Garner strongly favored a policy of maintaining the Iraqi army, and preparations towards this end began almost a year earlier. For instance, Colonel John Agoglia told the New York Times that “Starting in June 2002 we conducted targeted psychological operations using pamphlet drops, broadcasts and all sorts of means to get the message to the regular army troops that they should surrender or desert and that if they did we would bring them back.” The Times reported earlier that under Garner’s leadership, “Top commanders were meeting secretly with former Iraqi officers to discuss the best way to rebuild the force and recall Iraqi soldiers back to duty when Mr. Bremer arrived in Baghdad with his plan.”

In the same story, the Times claimed that “The Bush administration did not just discuss keeping the old army. General Garner’s team found contractors to retrain it.” Bremer, however, showed up with policy ideas that diverged sharply from Garner’s.

In his memoir, Bremer names the officials who approached him for his CPA job. He recounts telling his wife that:

I had been contacted by Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and by Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense. The Pentagon’s original civil administration in ‘post-hostility’ Iraq—the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, ORHA—lacked expertise in high-level diplomatic negotiations and politics. … I had the requisite skills and experience for that position.

Regarding the de-Baathification order, both Bremer and Feith have written their own accounts of the week leading up to it, and the slight discrepancy between their recollections is revealing in what it tells us about Bremer—and consequently about Wolfowitz and Libby for having selected him. At first blush, Bremer and Feith’s justifications for the policy appear to dovetail, each comparing postwar Iraq to postwar Nazi Germany. Bremer explains in a retrospective Washington Post op-ed, “What We Got Right in Iraq,” that “Hussein modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler’s, which controlled the German people with two main instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich’s security services. We had no choice but to rid Iraq of the country’s equivalent organizations.” For his part, Feith goes a step further, reasoning in his memoir War and Decision that the case for de-Baathification was even stronger because “The Nazis, after all, had run Germany for a dozen years; the Baathists had tyrannized Iraq for more than thirty.”

Regarding the order itself, Bremer writes,

The day before I left for Iraq in May, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith presented me with a draft law that would purge top Baathists from the Iraqi government and told me that he planned to issue it immediately. Recognizing how important this step was, I asked Feith to hold off, among other reasons, so I could discuss it with Iraqi leaders and CPA advisers. A week later, after careful consideration, I issued this ‘de-Baathification’ decree, as drafted by the Pentagon.

In contrast, Feith recalls that Bremer asked him to wait because “Bremer had thoughts of his own on the subject, he said, and wanted to consider the de-Baathification policy carefully. As the new CPA head, he thought he should announce and implement the policy himself.”

The notion that he “carefully” considered the policy in his first week on the job, during which he also travelled halfway around the globe, is highly questionable. Incidentally, Bremer’s oxymoronic statement—“a week later, after careful consideration”—mirrors a similar formulation of Wolfowitz’s about the disbanding order. Speaking to the Washington Post in November 2003, he said that forming a new Iraqi army is “what we’re trying to do at warp speed—but with careful vetting of the people we’re bringing on.”

Simply put, Bremer was tempted by headline-grabbing policies. He was unlikely to question any action that offered opportunities to make bold gestures, which made him easy to influence. Indeed, another quality of Bremer’s professional persona that conspicuously emerges from accounts of the period is his unwillingness to think for himself. His memoir shows that he was eager to put Jay Garner in his place from the moment he arrived in Iraq, yet he was unable to defend himself on his own when challenged by Garner, who—according to Bob Woodward in his book State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III—was “stunned” by the disbanding order. Woodward claims that when Garner confronted Bremer about it, “Bremer, looking surprised, asked Garner to go see Walter B. Slocombe.”

What’s even more surprising is how Bremer doesn’t hide his intellectual dependence on Slocombe. He writes in his memoir:

To help untangle these problems, I was fortunate to have Walt Slocombe as Senior Adviser for defense and security affairs. A brilliant former Rhodes Scholar from Princeton and a Harvard-educated attorney, Walt had worked for Democratic administrations for decades on high-level strategic and arms control issues.

In May 2003, the Washington Post noted of Slocombe that “Although a Democrat, he has maintained good relations with Wolfowitz and is described by some as a ‘Democratic hawk,’” a remark that once again places Wolfowitz in close proximity to Bremer and the disbanding order. Sure enough, in November 2003 the Washington Post reported:

The demobilization decision appears to have originated largely with Walter B. Slocombe, a former undersecretary of defense appointed to oversee Iraqi security forces. He believed strongly in the need to disband the army and felt that vanquished soldiers should not expect to be paid a continuing salary. He said he developed the policy in discussions with Bremer, Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. ‘This is not something that was dreamed up by somebody at the last minute and done at the insistence of the people in Baghdad. It was discussed,’ Slocombe said. ‘The critical point was that nobody argued that we shouldn’t do this.’

Given that the president agreed to preserve the Iraqi army in the NSC meeting on March 12, Slocombe’s statement is evidence of a major policy inconsistency. In that meeting, Feith, at the request of Donald Rumsfeld, gave a PowerPoint presentation prepared by Garner about keeping the Iraqi army; in his own memoir, Feith writes, “No one at that National Security Council meeting in early March spoke against the recommendation, and the President approved Garner’s plan.” But this is not what happened. What happened instead was the reversal of Garner’s plan, which Feith attributes to Slocombe and Bremer:

Bremer and Slocombe argued that it would better serve U.S. interests to create an entirely new Iraqi army: Sometimes it is easier to build something new than to refurbish a complex and badly designed structure. In any event, Bremer and Slocombe reasoned, calling the old army back might not succeed—but the attempt could cause grave political problems.

Over time, both Bremer and Slocombe have gone so far as to deny that the policies had any tangible effects. Bremer claimed in the Washington Post that “Virtually all the old Baathist ministers had fled before the decree was issued” and that “When the draftees saw which way the war was going, they deserted and, like their officers, went back home.” Likewise Slocombe stated in a PBS interview, “We didn’t disband the army. The army disbanded itself. … What we did do was to formally dissolve all of the institutions of Saddam’s security system. The intelligence, his military, his party structure, his information and propaganda structure were formally disbanded and the property turned over to the Coalition Provisional Authority.”

Thus, according to Bremer and Slocombe’s accounts, neither de-Baathification nor disbanding the army achieved anything that hadn’t already happened. When coupled with Bremer’s assertion of “careful consideration in one week” and Wolfowitz’s claim of “careful vetting at warp speed,” Bremer and Slocombe’s notion of “doing something that had already been done” creates a strong impression that they are hiding something or trying to finesse history with wordplay. Perhaps Washington Post journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran provides the best possible explanation for this confusion in his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, when he writes, “Despite the leaflets instructing them to go home, Slocombe had expected Iraqi soldiers to stay in their garrisons. Now he figured that calling them back would cause even more problems.” Chandrasekaran adds, “As far as Slocombe and Feith were concerned, the Iraqi army had dissolved itself; formalizing the dissolution wouldn’t contradict Bush’s directive.” This suggests that Slocombe and Feith were communicating and that Slocombe was fully aware of the policy the president had agreed to in the NSC meeting on March 12, yet he chose to disregard it.

♦♦♦

Following the disastrous decisions of May 2003, the blame game has been rife among neoconservative policymakers. One of those who have expended the most energy dodging culpability is, predictably, Bremer. In early 2007, he testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and the Washington Post reported: “Bremer proved unexpectedly agile at shifting blame: to administration planners (‘The planning before the war was inadequate’), his superiors in the Bush administration (‘We never had sufficient support’), and the Iraqi people (‘The country was in chaos—socially, politically and economically’).”

Bremer also wrote in May 2007 in the Washington Post, “I’ve grown weary of being a punching bag over these decisions—particularly from critics who’ve never spent time in Iraq, don’t understand its complexities and can’t explain what we should have done differently.” (This declaration is ironic, given Bremer’s noted inability to justify the disbanding policy to General Garner.) On September 4, 2007, the New YorkTimes reported that Bremer had given the paper exculpatory letters supposedly proving that George W. Bush confirmed the disbanding order. But the Times concluded, “the letters do not show that [Bush] approved the order or even knew much about it. Mr. Bremer referred only fleetingly to his plan midway through his three-page letter and offered no details.” Moreover, thepaper characterized Bremer’s correspondence with Bush as “striking in its almost nonchalant reference to a major decision that a number of American military officials in Iraq strongly opposed.” Defending himself on this point, Bremer claimed, “the policy was carefully considered by top civilian and military members of the American government.” And six months later Bremer told the paper, “It was not my responsibility to do inter-agency coordination.”

Feith and Slocombe have been similarly evasive when discussing President Bush’s awareness of the policies. The Los Angeles Times noted that “Feith was deeply involved in the decision-making process at the time, working closely with Bush and Bremer,” yet “Feith said he could not comment about how involved the president was in the decision to change policy and dissolve the army. ‘I don’t know all the details of who talked to who about that,’ he said.” For his part, Slocombe told PBS’s “Frontline,”

What happens in Washington in terms of how the [decisions are made]—‘Go ahead and do this, do that; don’t do that, do this, even though you don’t want to do it’—that’s an internal Washington coordination problem about which I know little. One of the interesting things about the job from my point of view—all my other government experience basically had been in the Washington end, with the interagencies process and setting the priorities—at the other end we got output. And how the process worked in Washington I actually know very little about, because the channel was from the president to Rumsfeld to Bremer.

It’s a challenge to parse Slocombe’s various statements. Here, in the space of two sentences, he claims both that his government experience has mostly been in Washington and that he doesn’t know how Washington works. As mentioned earlier, he had previously told the Washington Post that the disbanding order was not “done at the insistence of the people in Baghdad”—in other words, the decision was made in Washington. The inconsistency of his accounts from year to year, and even in the same interview, adds to an aura of concealment.

This further illustrates the disconnect between what was decided by the NSC in Washington in March and by the CPA in Iraq in May. In his memoir, Feith notes that although he supported the disbanding policy, “the decision became associated with a number of unnecessary problems, including the apparent lack of interagency review.”

The blame game is nowhere more evident than in a 2007 Vanity Fair article entitled “Neo Culpa,” which was previewed online just before the 2006 midterm elections. Writer David Rose spoke with numerous neoconservatives, who roundly censured George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, and Bremer for the chaos in Iraq. Speaking broadly about the Bush administration, Adelman said, “They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era.” And Perle complained, “The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn’t get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly. At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.”

Yet Perle’s reflection on the timeliness of decisions conflicts with President Bush’s account rather strikingly. In his memoir, Bush writes:

I should have insisted on more debate on Jerry’s orders, especially on what message disbanding the army would send and how many Sunnis the de-Baathification would affect. Overseen by longtime exile Ahmed Chalabi, the de-Baathification program turned out to cut much deeper than we expected, including mid-level party members like teachers.

In June 2004, Bill Kristol was already censuring the president for his “poor performance,” musing that his school of thought has been collateral damage in a mismanaged foreign policy: neoconservatism, he wrote, “has probably been weakened by the Bush administration’s poor performance in implementing what could be characterized as its recommended foreign policy.” Kristol argued that “This failure in execution has been a big one. It has put the neoconservative ‘project’ at risk. Much more important, it has put American foreign policy at risk.” Perle echoed this view two years later when he told Vanity Fair, “Huge mistakes were made … they were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad.”

This downplaying of neoconservative influence in “what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad” is curious, and Perle is not the only person to have tried it. Max Boot, writing in the same 2004 collection as Kristol, does the same thing when, after naming Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, Elliott Abrams, and Perle as neoconservatives who served Bush, he argues:

Each of these policy-makers has been an outspoken advocate for aggressive and, if necessary, unilateral action by the United States to promote democracy, human rights, and free markets, and to maintain U.S. primacy around the world. While this list seems impressive, it also reveals that the neocons have no representatives in the administration’s top tier.

But apparently it didn’t matter that there were no neoconservatives in top positions—not when one considers the knowledge and prior government experience of Vice President Cheney, the neoconservatives’ sponsor. In A World Transformed, George H.W. Bush writes of Cheney that he “knew how policy was made.” Barton Gellman observes in Angler, his book about Cheney: “Most of the government’s work, Cheney knew, never reached the altitude of Senate-confirmed appointees. Reliable people in mid-level posts would have the last word on numberless decisions about where to spend or not spend money, whom to regulate, how to enforce.” In the end avoiding the highest positions in the administration makes it all the more easy to dodge blame.

♦♦♦

Americans are painfully familiar with stories like this one, in which a coterie of advisors takes policy in a dangerous direction with little or no knowledge on the part of the president. But the case of the Iraq War and the decisions that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein has a unique importance—because we are still living with the consequences, and others are dying for them.

Democrats may be tempted to dismiss all that happened in the Bush years as simply the other party’s fault. Republicans have a comforting myth of their own in the belief that President Bush’s 2007 “surge” of U.S. forces into Iraq ended the country’s instability, which only returned after President Obama fully withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011. But as the role of Walter Slocombe—the Democratic counterpart to Doug Feith in more ways than one—illustrates, Clintons no less than Bushes are susceptible to this personnel problem.

Republicans, meanwhile, should consider retired Lt. Col. Gian Gentile’s verdict that “the reduction in violence” in Iraq in 2007 “had more to do with the Iraqis than the Americans,” specifically with the Sunni tribesmen’s newfound willingness to fight (for a price) alongside Americans against al-Qaeda and with Moqtada al-Sadr’s de-escalation of Shi’ite activity. But regardless of what the surge did or did not contribute to quelling the bloodshed in Iraq, the intensity of the civil war that raged there in the first place was in considerable part a product of misguided de-Baathification and disbanding policies—and the Islamic State today depends on the military and intelligence forces that Bremer, Feith, and Slocombe casually dismissed.

When you have the wrong diagnosis, you risk coming to the wrong solution, no matter how clever you think you are. As the GOP candidates for the 2016 presidential election have made their campaigns official, they have been pummeled with hindsight questions about the Iraq War and ISIS, and no one has a harder time facing this than Jeb Bush. In order to correctly address what to do about the Islamic State, it is important to acknowledge what specifically went wrong with decision-making in the Iraq War.

This episode highlights a weakness in the executive branch that is ripe for exploitation under any administration. When the neoconservative Frank Gaffney, speaking about George W. Bush, told Vanity Fair, “This president has tolerated, and the people around him have tolerated, active, ongoing, palpable insubordination and skullduggery that translates into subversion of his policies,” it seems incredible to think that he failed to see the irony of his assertion. But for those who have a deep understanding of how the government works, it is quite possible to undermine a president, then step back and pretend to have had minimal involvement, and finally stand in judgment. But now that the story is known, the American people can be the judges.

John Hay is a former executive branch official under Republican administrations.

Bush was 100% at fault. He chose to appoint Rumsfeld and Cheney as top members of his administration. These were strong-willed men who had both served his father well. The problem was Bush Jr. was not his father. The old man was older and more experienced than either of his underlings AND he was the President. As a result these strong personalities were truly subordinate to Bush Sr. Both men were older and vastly more experienced than the son, and he was no match for them.

Hence the Iraq policy was not a coherent policy set by the office of the POTUS but many strategies, often conflicting, because POTUS was absent. Some (Garner) were working to replace Saddam with someone better, leaving the government in place, to facilitate a quick exit. Others (Bremer) thought they were working to establish a capitalist democracy in the Middle East. And some I suppose some (Kay) thought the war had been about WMDs.

Wah wah, Bush was a victim. Yeepers. My takeaway: the minions, advisors, apparatchik melt away, and Bush- as those before him, and inevitably those to follow – somehow are also given a free pass through plausible deniability. No man is an island, and one only need look at an aerial photo of DC to realize that there are a LOT of moving parts, many folks with impact, and a ton money floating around to lubricate the whole deal. Little Versailles on the Potomac , with lethal global consequences.

The heading of “The Deciders” claims that “The disastrous Iraq policies that led to ISIS were not President Bush’s.”

You’re joking?

How were these pivotal, publicly-announced policies not Bush’s?

Bush was President!

The May 16, 2003 CPA Order Number 1 “de-Baathified” the Iraqi government and the May 23, CPA Order Number 2 disbanded the Iraqi army. “In short, Baath party members were barred from participation in Iraq’s new government and Saddam Hussein’s soldiers lost their jobs, taking their weapons with them.”

John Hay says that considering the discussions of these two areas of Iraq occupation policy at two National Security Council meetings, (March 10 and March 12) “it is unclear whether Bush himself knew about these policies before they were enacted.”

But when two such vitally important polices were announced on May 16th and May 23rd, if the President had seen that the announced policies were contrary to the policies he favored – and that Order Number 1 and Order Number 2 represented in effect a mid-level mutiny within his administration’s chain of command – it was certainly Bush’s duty as President to immediately rescind those policies and to fire all of those responsible.

But President Bush didn’t rescind the policies.

He didn’t fire those who had issued policies allegedly contrary to his own.

Instead, he said nothing contrary to either CPA Order Number 1 or CPA Order Number 2 and allowed the orders to stand.

I have no idea why the heading of this John Hay article claims that “the disastrous Iraq policies that led to ISIS were not President Bush’s” when in fact those policies WERE President Bush’s.

I said at the time, it was obvious these clueless people were re-living WWII, and that it was completely inappropriate, as are most historical comparisons. Rumsfeld even looked and talked like someone out of the 1940s. It was comical in a sad sort of way. Virtually everyone in Saddam’s government was required to be a Baathist, down to the lowest levels. And there simply was not the depth of education in the general population to be able to throw out an entire government, including all of the working bureaucrats and to be able to quickly recruit new qualified people and ramp up a new government effectively. It was not a developed country like Germany or Japan. And just think about it. People who had spent their working lives in the Iraq government were dumped out on the streets. And we thought they would consider us liberators?

So your point is that George “I am the Decider” Bush should not be blamed because all of the people that he hand-picked and then trusted implicitly with no oversight are the ones who really screwed up, is that it?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all in favor of naming the names of all the advisors down the line, and holding them appropriately responsible (seeing as how they all continue to be employed as advisors to the current candidates); but that in no way lets W off the hook for his own incompetence as a leader.

“Political progress has come to a near standstill, and most of the established benchmarks for progress – including provincial elections, the passage of de-Baathification laws, and a plan for oil revenue-sharing – are far from reach.” – Democrat House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, January 10, 2008.

Two days before the Iraqi parliament unanimously passed the “Accountability and Justice” de-Baathification law.

I’d say this puts culpability for the Iraq debacle squarely in the laps of every voter who cast a ballot for GW Bush in 2000.

After all – not only Bush’s lack of foreign policy experience, but his inability to really speak in depth on foreign policy during the campaign, constituted huge red flags. Yet voters lined up to vote for this man who not only was inexperienced but seemed disinterested in foreign policy – a complete lightweight – because as I heard over and over they were confident that he would surround himself with “smart people” who would guide him.

So basically – everyone who voted for Bush deliberately voted for those self-same “smart people”, instead of the highly experienced and clearly well informed Gore, had served in Vietnam, had served on the House Intelligence Committee (and introduced and arms control plan), had sat on the Senate Homeland Security and Armed Services Committees, and had a record of trying to pull US support for Saddam back in the 80’s, when the Reagan Administration was still sending arms and money (Reagan threatened a veto of his bill).

The GOP voters chose Bush knowing full well that guys like Bremer, Feith, Wolfowitz, Libby, Pearle, and of course Cheney were going to be the ones doing all the heavy lifting on our foreign policy.

Whether he knew it or not Bush ’43 inherited a mess left by his father and Clinton. All of those PNAC members believed they could subjugate Iraq and the rest would fall in line were mistaken. The men and women who died in the Middle East from 1990 thru today were wasted.

I think the headline and tagline actually do a disservice to this otherwise excellent article. They bring the reader in with the assumption that the author is trying exculpate Bush by distancing him from these terrible policies, but that assumed intent is not borne out by the actual text (“while the responsibility for what happened ultimately lies with George W. Bush…”). I think this is a very informative chronicle of how government can be co-opted by mid-level bureaucrats, and perhaps a title change might better reflect this focus.

There is great irony in the claim that Bush’s de-Baathification policies in Iraq were inspired by the de-Nazification policies in postwar Germany. For one of the lessons of that era was that the policy of removing all Nazi Party members from positions of authority was foolish and made governing Germany unmanageable. In due course, the policy of de-Nazification was loosened and many functionaries of the Hitler regime, who had been NSDAP members but not ideologues and were happy to serve the new order as they had been the old, were put in positions of authority and the transition out of Allied Military Government and the restoration of a functioning German state, a member of the anti-Soviet alliance, in the West was successfully accelerated. It was only late in the Twentieth Century, with the rise of the neo-cons in American politics, that this history was revised and the wisdom of even bringing ex-Nazi scientists to the U.S., who enabled us to develop a new generation of weapons and win the “space race” with the Soviet Union, began to be questioned. Magnanimity to the defeated in battle has always been the mark of a wise ruler. Incessant reproaches for past sins is a prescription for unending division and strife in any society which tolerates it.

I agree with those above who note that Bush was no more ignorant of the policies being implemented by his government in Iraq than were the American people who heard it reported. He has no excuse for not countermanding orders which were not his. He is responsible for all of them.

This was without a doubt Bush’s fault and his decision. He was just not intellectually strong enough to challenge or question the expertise of others. So he just let things flow as they did without giving them the resistance and or rejections.

By pure coincidence I have been reading Woodward’s book State of Denial mentioned in this article for the last several weeks and the key players don’t share the view that Bush was left out of these decisions. It’s a very compelling read.

If you’ve read Greg Palast’s 2006 book “Armed Madhouse”, where he talked about the State Department’s and National Security Council’s pre-9/11 Plan A (which would have kept the Baathist power structure pretty much intact) and the neocons’ post-9/11 Plan B (which purged the Baathists from the military and government), then you already know about all of this.

I vividly remember being laughed at, as far back as 2002, when I asserted that this entire bit of inevitable, impending foolishness was due to half of Bush’s Cabinet being drawn from the ranks of PNAC.

The media (CNN, FOX, MSNBC, et al) only report the “news” that is “print to fit.” They have no knowledge of the truth (or no desire to report it).

Project for the New American Century . . . it isn’t difficult; simply spend some time reading the contents of their website. Why NOT learn all you can about the members of the President’s Cabinet?

There was no manner of invasion and occupation which would not have resulted in some type of multi-pronged insurgencies and medium if not long term chaos.
Yes, the neocons assumed none of this, but they don’t care much as long as they are not charged with war crimes, their specific reputations are not harmed, and Israel is not threatened.

I absolutely hate the entire premise of the Iraq war but to play devil’s advocate, are Conservative non-interventionists saying that it would have been a success had we kept Saddam’s army intact? Certainly disbanding it was a disaster but I kind of shudder at the thought that this war can somehow be justified on the basis that the occupation was simply botched.

On November 4, 1960 a group of us from my high school went to hear Dr. Wernher von Braun, who was a featured speaker at the 76th Annual Convention of the Virginia Education Association in Richmond. At the time von Braun was serving as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center where he was the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that would eventually propel the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.

Dr. von Braun gave a very inspiration address and those in our group – most of whom were already interested in a career in math, the sciences, and engineering—were thrilled.

The next week in school some of the teaching staff discussed with some of us who had attended the speech the fact that Dr. von Braun had worked in Germany’s rocket development program, where he helped design and develop the V-2 at Peenemünde; during that time he had been a member of the Nazi Party and the SS and had at times been involved in the selection and supervision of some of the forced labor that was used in the V-2 program at Peenemünde. We all knew that, obviously, Dr. von Braun and other German rocket scientists brought to the US after the war were exceptions to the general US/Allied policy of de-Nazification. We, both students and teachers, had such an interesting series of discussions with speakers on both sides of the issue.

William Dalton writes that “in due course, the policy of de-Nazification was loosened and many functionaries of the Hitler regime, who had been NSDAP members but not ideologues and were happy to serve the new order as they had been the old, were put in positions of authority and the transition out of Allied Military Government and the restoration of a functioning German state.”

I agree with two important points that William Dalton makes:

(1) “Magnanimity to the defeated in battle has always been the mark of a wise ruler. Incessant reproaches for past sins is a prescription for unending division and strife in any society which tolerates it.”

(2) “There is great irony in the claim that Bush’s de-Baathification policies in Iraq were inspired by the de-Nazification policies in postwar Germany.”

Without the de-Baathification, we may have ended up with a stable Iraqi government. That means one that would now be headed by someone similar to Saddam Hussein. Until the people of Iraq can resolve their differences – and they don’t show any evidence of approaching this point – only a despotic ruler can keep any order. The problem is that we don’t want order. We want to chase idealistic dreams. If we had any rational assessment of the situation in the Middle East, we wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. So the de-Baathification was logically consistent with the misguided nature of our overall mission.

It is useful to remember the real goal behind deBaathification. And it wasn’t because it was strategic from a military/security standpoint. It was strategic from a purely ideological standpoint.

After WWII, the US government forced both Japan and Germany to accept labor unions, which had been anathema in both nations prior to the war. Strong welfare provisions were incorporated into both countries laws by the occupation authorities. And what do you know – both countries flourished economically in the coming decades.

The Bush Administration was filled with Heritage vetted appointees who wanted Iraq to be a new model – of what would happen if you took all the Heritage wet dreams and stick them into a country and the moribund economy after the last decade of sanctions took off? It was to be a perfect laboratory to demonstrate that right wing economic policies were the way to go. A flat tax, sale of government assets to private companies, opening Iraq up to international corporations with little or no regulation, dismantling Saddam’s socialist economic infrastructure – these were seemingly prioritized more by the people the Bush Administration sent to Iraq that security concerns. Dedication to Heritage/free market principles was valued for Reconstruction authorities over knowledge and experience in Middle Eastern geopolitics.

And you had to deBaathify Iraq, totally cleanse the government of Baathist officials and laws, to make the Heritage Foundation’s dream come true. In their mind, the deck was stacked – oil revenues would guarantee success for their experiment, and provide a counter-narrative to the post-war economic successes of Germany and Japan.

Alas – supply side economics can never fail – it can only be failed. See Kansas today.

“Mr. Bush has unabashedly shown his dependence on Ms. Rice … Ms. Rice’s role is all the more critical because Mr. Bush doesn’t like to read briefing books on the nuts-and-bolts of national security, and his lack of experience in foreign affairs has raised questions about his preparedness for the White House. ”

“While the junior Bush may lack his father’s resume — CIA director, ambassador to China, architect of the Gulf War victory — George W. has inherited some of his father’s top aides, and with little experience of his own, Bush says he will rely on their advice. ”

“Mr Bush has shown little interest in getting to know the world beyond Texas, where he is governor, having travelled abroad only three times in his adult life, excluding visits to neighbouring Mexico. He has not even visited Canada. This means that Mr Bush, if he takes the White House, will inevitably rely on more seasoned advisers in formulating America’s future defence and foreign policy.”

“I’d say this puts culpability for the Iraq debacle squarely in the laps of every voter who cast a ballot for GW Bush in 2000.”

I voted for G.W Bush for the Executive Office. And I have no issues taking responsibility for my vote. I will also take responsibility for my failure in convincing him not to support:

1. the long term application of the PA

2. Invading Afghanistan as opposed to treating the matter as a course of law, thereby putting the processes of the FBI, in conjunction with the State Department and if need be, the CIA, Special Ops. – using an incision instead of a cudgel.

3. Not invading Iraq at all

I completely and utterly failed. That failure resides quite deep in my being. However, being a conservative is not really responsible for the decisions made. In fact, if anything conservative thought would have steered a far different course.
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I do not think for a minute that the author is denying where the ultimate responsibility lies. To say that the “buck” stops at the executive office goes without saying.

The article dissects the failure to its managers. It’s like Benghazi. Sure the executive must ultimately bare responsibility. However, understanding how the director of the State Department mismanaged matters is important in understanding government. Especially in terms of accountability. And at its core is one of the reasons that big government (scale and efficiency) is problematic to any organization. The ability of senior and midlevel managers to avoid responsibility for their choices by blaming the upper echelons.

The lines of ownership get blurred through weak “delegated” accountability. It’s similar to the arguments made about 9/11. Nothing in the Admin. was available for them to act in CONUS on the actors involved because that information was not passed on by the agencies that had it. The general “hair on fire” threat analysis did not include known terrorists that had made it to the US. It did not include data that the same were learning to fly airliners minus landing and take offs(?). Any of the knowledgeable agencies could have acted minus direct involvement of the WH, but they did not. Those agencies: CIA, FBI, State Department and the airlines application of “no fly lists”.

Sure September 11 occurred while Pres. Bush was in office, but there is a reason why one delegates authority.

As to Iraq, absolutely, heads should have rolled. All of which is a matter of management style within an organizations culture and environment. And on a scale this large — anyone who doesn’t comprehend that vital errors are only covered by chance more often than not, doesn’t get this article in my view.

I will skip the sad tales of the Iraqi government being Nazi’s, by way of Chalabi and company. But an examination of large scale conflicts, such as WWII, for example will reveal managerial disasters that cost lost lives needlessly.

The Iraq example has one over riding reality. We never should invaded in the first place. Here I think the Pres. ignored his instincts. My opinion despite the “cowboy” image, Pres. Bush is not a decisive gunslinger and given the 9/11 scenarios. He needn’t have been. I think no small number of choices were undermined by others.

While I certainly appreciate sanctimonious retorts. The emotional anger and dismay experienced by most of the country played no small roll in the decisions, including that of no small number of democrats and liberals.

Forget the WH and Congress, trying explaining in sane language why actions taken should not have been to members of the public was tantamount to treason.

So taking a cue from the vote for Pres. Bush to blame. How about anyone who supported the use of the military in both campaigns.

The article makes telling points against Bremer, Feith, et al., but that does not and should not absolve GWB. He was President, and the buck stopped with him.

I would add two points. First that wars are always messy affairs. Anyone who talks of surgical wars is either a fool or a fraud (if not both). Second, this whole chain of events started with GHW Bush’s decision to go to war in 1990.

Rock Sash, I don’t know if you were responding to my post but just in case you were thank you, it provides a good explanation. In short, the more rational management of Iraq leads us closer to the pre-invasion Iraq version of Iraq which of course means that we should not have invaded.
No one is suggesting that Saddam was a good guy and in fact, now that they have been birthed, I wish the current govt of Iraq well. As someone who respects the sovereignty of nations I am appalled at those who want to meddle further in Iraq by partitioning their country into three separate countries to fix a problem that we created because we don’t like that the Shiites are the majority and are predictably aligned with Iran. No, let’s leave them alone and let them re-take the Sunni portion of Iraq and try to re-integrate it back into their country. If we meddle and try to create ‘Sunnistan’ then the geniuses in our country are going to discover that it will be harder than they think to keep it from becoming ISI(S-) 2.

If this is true, then clearly the inmates were running the asylum. And still are i.e. Benghazi. And it was probably always thus, no matter whose administration was in charge. This suggests the presence of some deep-seated structural problems not only within the Executive Department but with the very way in which we presume to govern ourselves as a country.

@Connecticut Farmer says:If this is true, then clearly the inmates were running the asylum.

It seems to me that inmates running the asylum has been a feature of GOP foreign policy for awhile (eg – Iran/Contra and Ollie North … April Glaspie’s assurances to Saddam that his border dispute with Kuwait was not a concern to the US …)

OTOH – Benghazi? I don’t get the connection, except in that these days conservatives seem to want to link Benghazi to everything.

“Conservative non-interventionists” worthy of the name would not attempt to justify the war, period.

As far as voters owning a share of the guilt, I believe anyone who votes for candidates of either of the corrupt duopoly rather than helping build alternative parties run the likely risk of sharing
in any unjustified intervention ultimately carried out.
Granted this belief rests on the assumption both the GOP and Dems are either irredeemable or a viable multiparty system is necessary to nudge them into redemption.

@ balconesfault who wrote: “After WWII, the US government forced both Japan and Germany to accept labor unions, which had been anathema in both nations prior to the war. Strong welfare provisions were incorporated into both countries laws by the occupation authorities.”

You’re right, balconesfault, that the “socialists” of the National Socialist German Workers Party — like the “socialists” of the Union of Soviet “Socialist” Republics — banned membership in all unions that were not under government control and they outlawed all strikes.

But you’re wrong, balconesfault, with respect to Nazi welfare provisions. One of the means by which the Nazis maintained strong popular support was through a generous welfare state that particularly benefitted German lower classes. Hitler implemented price and rent controls, higher corporate taxes, much higher taxes on capital gains, and subsidies to German farmers to protect them from weather and price fluctuations. The Nazi government increased pension benefits substantially and put in place a state-run health care system.

baconesfault – “After WWII, the US government forced both Japan and Germany to accept labor unions, which had been anathema in both nations prior to the war. Strong welfare provisions were incorporated into both countries laws by the occupation authorities. And what do you know – both countries flourished economically in the coming decades.”

Why must you always look at the world through donkey colored glasses?

Actually, the rejection of the US imposed economic straight jacket, which included price controls is credited by economists in Germany for the economic success in Germany. The fathers of Ordo-liberalism, Franz Bohm, Walter Euken, Ludwig Erhard, and others pushed these reforms. Erhard in particular, as Economics minister defied the occupation authority and abolished the price controls and other economic controls that were in place, and at the same time introduced the deutsche mark, replacing the reichsmark. A hard money policy is a tenet of Ordoliberalism. They reject the concept of economic stimulus.

Ordo-liberalism is a system that is a “third way” system between classical liberalism and the socialist system. Its based on free market economics, but the adherents believe government is required to ensure free markets remain free from monopolies and other manipulations that may occur that would destroy a free market.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism

@Johann Actually, the rejection of the US imposed economic straight jacket, which included price controls is credited by economists in Germany for the economic success in Germany. The fathers of Ordo-liberalism, Franz Bohm, Walter Euken, Ludwig Erhard, and others pushed these reforms.

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions.

Great comments. I’ll reiterate what I said previously about the general topic:

I don’t think there are enough sane “mid-level” Republicans in DC to properly staff any incoming administration, even a Paul one. I know that sounds harsh, but I know it in my gut, is that fair? By all available lights, Cheney/Rumsfeld types and their lackeys still dominate the GOP on foreign policy, hell, if even the Democrats are compromised, it is beyond me how anyone can believe that a newly moderate and sensible GOP foreign policy staff has magically materialized in the last eight years but is somehow still keeping largely silent. Where are they? Where’s the proof that the risks have been mitigated?

I did not say that the Nazi’s did not have a welfare state (although they did limit beneficiaries to those of Aryan blood). I merely noted that the reconstruction authorities incorporated strong welfare provisions into the post-war laws of Germany and Japan, and that those countries economies (and quality of life) flourished in subsequent years.

baconesfault – I don’t think we are in much disagreement regarding the disaster that was Iraq’s occupation. I do not take issue with the fact that the Iraq economic disaster was set up by the Bush administration. I don’t think it was a failure of capitalism though. It was a long term Christmas present for major corporations. And according to a friend of mine who was there as a civilian working for the US Army Corps of Engineers, it was worse than crony capitalism. Outright theft by contractors was rampant and purposely overlooked. I would not call that a failure of capitalism. It was a predictable result of crony capitalism corruption and the lack of the rule of law.

“Benghazi? I don’t get the connection, except in that these days conservatives seem to want to link Benghazi to everything.”

I am unclear if you understand the concept here. It is not generally referred to as surgical warfare, though I get why you use the term. It’s surgical “strike”.

Those uses of force with very specific objectives and generally limitted goals. Ten tears too late and anti-climatic at best, the capture of Bin Laden would be considred such an operation.

The Benghazi matter is simple. The executive in the WH delegatese State Deapt operations to the Sec of State. While he is ultimately responsible because he sits at the head. The immediate responsibility rests with those to whom he delegates authority. The Embassy personnnel send tepetaed dispatches that the security environment in Libya id deteriorating and doing so quickly. They dispatch the need for help. The State department misjudges, mischaracterizes or ignors the on the scene damage reports and the call for help. Instead choosing to focus on the political response to Libyan violence. Embassy is attacked and personnel are killed.

The Sec of State is immediately responsible. We now no so much more based on the details of events. That anyone in the State Department should be ashamed for blaiming the matter on internet videos or anything else other than our support for a rebellion, that backfired.

On the larger question, to accountability — Executives can mullify the impact by taking corrective action and or holding his delegates responsible. I think the perception here is that no one has been held accountable in either admin.

Perhaps, Sec. Clinton lost her position at the state department as consequence. But the accountability for failed leadership in several disasterous foreign policy advances seems to be a bid for the WH. Which begs the question — what does accountability mean.

In either admin. it seems to hold no value. I think the article demonstrates the issues very well.

Very interesting article. I understand that it is not an apology or an excuse for W. Rather, it is a deconstruction of the antics of what The Economist once referred to as “this most inept of administrations”.

It makes sense. So much attention is paid to the Executive that not enough is paid to the coterie that comes with him. In W’s case the was Cheney, Rove and those whom Bush Sr. referred to as “the crazies in the basement”.

Considering the role that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith et al played in ginning up the war, it is not surprising that they and their cohort proceeded to screw it up once they got it.

It was ill conceived and poorly executed and rightly stands as our most disastrous foreign policy bungle ever. The fact that the authors still refuse to believe that it was ill conceived, only poorly executed, shows what their judgement is worth. Nothing.

@EliteCommInc – I think the confusion I have here is over accountability for strategy, versus accountability for tactics.

The de-Baathification of Iraq was a strategy. It was an enormous, ground changing plan, and one would expect accountability for this to run directly to the Chief Executive, not only for the giving responsibility for designing the strategy, but for approving the strategy itself.

Similarly, for the examples I brought up – Iran/Contra was a strategy. Selling weapons to Iran and using money to fund insurgents in Nicaragua wasn’t simply a matter of tactics. Again, it was the responsibility of the POTUS to know this was going on, and Reagan failed on this count. Whether or not the US had an interest in preserving the integrity of Kuwait’s borders with Iraq was a strategy, and not simply a tactic, and the President should have been involved in approving any communications with Saddam on that point.

Benghazi was a tactical failure. In a sense – it was analogous with 9/11 … nobody in the State Department wanted the consulate to be at risk of being overrun by terrorists anymore than nobody in the intelligence community or DOD wanted the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to suffer hits. Of course, Benghazi was 0.01% as significant a tactical failure as 9/11 was … but the failure was due to people who had been properly assigned responsibilities not doing their job.

To the extent that someone dropped the ball with Benghazi, this wasn’t due to mid-level bureaucrats making their own policies independent of the POTUS. Our involvement in Libya itself was a strategy, and Mr. Larison has repeatedly pointed out how it’s a shame that the Benghazi committee has microfocused on the tactics of protecting the consulate and the responsibility for failure to do so, rather than on the strategy that put our diplomatic personnel in the middle of that tinderbox in the first place.

That said, President Obama has clearly taken responsibility for the strategy. Our air cover for Libyan rebels, and our subsequent diplomatic efforts, are on his plate.

Excuse me, but I knew before! the invasion that toppling Hussein and installing a Shiite regime would unsettle that country and lead to civil war. I erred in thinking the civil war part would happen sooner than it has. I am simply an informed housewife and librarian. George Bush should have known, too, without any advisers telling him. Don’t give me the both sides do it malarkey.

In the above cases within the strategy or tactic, it’s remains the case of indivual failure.

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“The fact that the authors still refuse to believe that it was ill conceived, only poorly executed, shows what their judgement is worth. Nothing.”

In one of my rare defenses, I think you are dancing with an unknown. Whether the Iraq invasion was wise or not is not really part of the question here. While one can acknowledge it’s overall veracity, ther is value in examining the details of what transpired afterwards that made matters worse.

And i think disbanding the military was a huge contributor to subsequent events. And obviously so. For the message was that members of the military were essentially now enemies of the state they once fought to protect and as such they were on their own aort from state function. Excuse me but departing weapons in hand to fight back against any reprisals or making the efforts of the US and their newly established system makes perfect sense.

AHd they not disbanded the military which includes the admin. bureacracy, despite the head having been dismantled would have vital foundational systems in place upon which basic services would have remained functional, including and not the least of which was running water, electricty and basic policing.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the invasion. Making assessments about subsequent decisions and implementation are valuable in understanding what happened during the occupation. No doubt that Iraqis patrolling the streets, who the people, the language, customs and had some legtmate established authority would have been less problematic than US servicemen and, especially women playingthat role.